Final Thoughts on Splinter Cell: Double Agent

I’m kind of an idiot for only now finishing this game. It really is the best stealth-action series going, and Double Agent only solidifies that title. It’s a very tense and rewarding experience, and while all you’re really doing is sneaking up on enemies in the same manner over and over, the execution of every aspect of the gameplay is damn near perfect. My body tensed in unison with Sam Fisher’s as I got closer and closer to an enemy, and perfectly taking out someone without alerting other guards is, quite simply, fucking awesome. There are a variety of moves at your disposal in this regard, and they’re all contextual to the positioning of both you and the enemy. If you successfully get the drop on someone while their back is turned, you can choose to grab and choke them out, snap their neck, or give them a fierce elbow to the base of the skull. If you decide to grab them, sometimes you can interrogate them for information, and one of my favorite things to do was let them get about half their sentence out of their mouth, and then mid-sentence choke them out. It usually goes something like this: “Honest, man, that’s all I know! There’s trip wires all over the – aack, blurghhh, uhhhhh.” What's that? I didn't quite catch that last bit.

Aside from the enemy encounters, each level is unique and exciting to explore and stealth around until you find the right way to approach the given situation. During the course of the game, you’ll find yourself slinking along in a lot of suitably varied locales, and the missions never become boring or repetitive. In between missions, you’ll be tasked with bugging and generally spying on the JBA at their headquarters, and while I didn’t really like it at first, each progressive mission got better and better. The final headquarters mission is possibly one of my favorite endings in any game, or at least any game in the past few years. One thing I noted in my first impression of the game was the mechanic of balancing missions for the JBA and NSA. I thought it might be kind of shitty, but as it turns out, it was quite the opposite. While on a mission, there are multiple objectives for both sides. Some are primary, while others are totally optional and don’t affect the completion of the mission. Both sides have goals for you to accomplish, but if you aren’t able to do everything for everyone, it’s not a deal breaker. I found it really fun to try and do everything I could, but I simply couldn’t do them all. I know the ending changes in some regard based on the decisions you make, but I’m a bad ass and got the best ending possible, so suck on that. And I played it on hard, natch. Anyways, the story, while simple, hit all the right notes for this particular genre, and its culmination was insanely awesome and a blast to play through. Speaking of story, I much preferred Double Agent’s tale to the arguably more popular stealth-action game, Metal Gear. Obviously, it wasn’t anywhere near as complicated or dramatic (read: melodramatic) as Kojima’s series, but it did exactly what I wanted it to do. It gave me a plausible set up, logical progressions in the unfolding chain of events, and a fucking great ending. For a game like this, what else could you ask for? Nothing, as it turns out. Where Metal Gear tried forcing its false sense of deepness and worldly relevance on me, Double Agent was more concerned with letting me, you know, play the fucking thing. It’s quite nice to actually use stealth mechanics for more than ten minutes at a time before having to sit through a soap opera about a gay vampire and a formerly gay cyborg ninja. Honestly, who likes that shit? A lot of people, apparently. But whatever, it’s pretty damn awful in my opinion.

The last few missions of the game also reminded me of Metal Gear Solid 4. Being that this game came out first, that’s an interesting fact. The setting is like the first act of MGS 4, but with one big difference. In MGS 4, if you fired just one bullet, suddenly everyone on the battlefield was trained on you, and you alone. Not so in Double Agent. As you move along the level, you’ll encounter plenty of enemy soldiers who, upon seeing you, usually start shooting. But a lot of the time they cut their assaults short because they had to turn around and continue the fight they were already in. The whole thing felt like a real battlefield, because I wasn’t the prime target for anyone. I was simply moving through an ongoing conflict, and if they could take me out, great. If not, they have bigger things to worry about than some dude hiding behind a truck 30 yards away. It’s things like that I really appreciated, and it made the experience that much more memorable.

Of course, now I’m really interested in how Ubisoft is approaching Splinter Cell: Conviction. The game was given a hefty delay, and I really hope it turns out as good as I want it to be. Double Agent took the existing formula of past games in the series, shook up the story, and made the (basically) same mechanics feel fresh and new again. From what little I know about Conviction, I think it might do the same thing again. It seems the series is actually maturing and evolving with the times, instead of being stuck constantly remaking the same game. It’s a great thing, really, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the next iteration Ubisoft comes up with.


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First Impressions - Splinter Cell: Double Agent

Yes, I’m a bit late to the party on this one. Over two years late, actually. But I turned on Splinter Cell: Double Agent tonight for the first time, and it instantly brought back memories from the very first game in the series. I only played the second and third games briefly; in fact, I played so little that I can’t even tell you if they were good or not. But when the original Splinter Cell came out, I remember being absolutely floored by what I was looking at. The only other stealth games I’d ever played at that point were Metal Gear Solid and its sequel, Sons of Liberty. The difference between the two series was astounding to me, and more specifically, the realism Splinter Cell had on display was something I’d never seen in a game before. Darkness was my ally, and skulking through the shadows like a vampire on the prowl was truly an exhilarating experience. Looking back, I really wish I had hunkered down and completed Pandora Tomorrow and Chaos Theory. Maybe my I’ll go back to them at some point, but I have a sneaking suspicion (sneaking, ha) that after playing Double Agent, they won’t hold up quite so well.

The first mission of Double Agent instantly brought me back to 2002; it was like getting reacquainted with an old friend I hadn’t seen for years. Even though this was my first foray into Third Echelon’s chain of command since before I was of legal drinking age, I almost reflexively remembered what the game was about. Infiltration still works pretty much the same, and once I surfaced from my underwater sneaking point, I immediately put the first person I came across in a fantastic choke hold and read him a nice little bedtime story. One thing I noticed right away was even though this game is almost three years old, it still looks really great. The animations are particularly awesome to watch, and since I’ll be spending a lot of time shimmying across ledges and pulling myself over railings, the fact that Sam Fisher moves so smoothly won’t go unappreciated. One new addition to the formula this time around was the partner Sam had with him at the beginning of the mission. He was totally green, and eventually got himself killed by running into a room full of bad guys like a retard. I guess, then, it didn’t really add anything to my experience, but I know you can play some co-op missions, so I still have that to look forward to (if anyone is still playing this game, that is). The end of the first mission had me stopping a missile launch by basically putting a cork in the top of it and letting it blow itself up. It was a bit anti-climactic, though, since I just hopped in a helicopter and flew away without seeing any big explosions or anything. Big explosions equal big fun to the part of my brain that enjoys that sort of thing (the same part that still laughs at fart jokes, I think). Regardless, the first mission was pretty brief, but it served its purpose in making me remember what I loved so much about the series. But then, the second mission began.


Here’s where Double Agent departs from the previous games pretty drastically. For story reasons (I’ll get to that in a moment), Sam takes on a ridiculously dangerous mission which involves helping a member of a terrorist cell escape prison. His ultimate goal is to infiltrate the ranks of the cell and, um, probably stop them from doing whatever it is they’re doing. I’m not sure what that is just yet, but it probably involves big explosions and lots of anti-American stuff. So, yea…screw them. Aside from the plot, the gameplay also switches into a gear this series hasn’t used before. The mission starts off with Sam in prison, as just another inmate among the countless probable assholes hanging around the place. And right off the bat, I was tasked with starting a riot and helping that dirty terrorist escape. Fortunately, Sam had been digging a hole through his cell wall, so I used that to access the ventilation shaft above me and made my way to the guard room. I jumped down into the room and proceeded to elbow the guard in the face, which is my way of playing the “what’s that on your nose?” game. I then opened all the prisoners’ cell doors and threw smoke grenades everywhere to aid in their rather chaotic break. Here’s where I noticed something that might annoy me as I get further in the game: there’s two meters on the hud – one for JSA (the terrorist cell), and one for NSA (Sam’s organization). The more I help the bad guys by knocking out guards and the like, the more the meter for JSA goes up and NSA goes down. It’s a good idea, but it seemed like I was only able to take out a few guards before I apparently became untrustworthy, and I failed the mission. Maybe it’s just me, but if my goal is to get this dude out of prison and find out what his group is up to, I don’t think sucker-punching a bunch of security guards would put me out of the NSA’s good graces. It’s a much better alternative to them being shot in the head by the real terrorists, or so I would have thought. I hope the game becomes a little more lenient; otherwise it might become frustrating having to balance my decisions according to a really stringent trust-based system.

I haven’t finished this mission yet, so I guess I’ll have to wait and see how that mechanic plays out. But so far, I’m really enjoying the new gameplay elements Double Agent is introducing, and I’m actually interested in where the story is going to go. Speaking of story, I can’t say it’s off to the greatest of starts. The reason Sam took such a dangerous mission is because right after the game’s first mission, he learns his daughter was killed in some kind of car accident. He becomes a wreck, and feels he doesn’t have much left to live for so he takes on the most dangerous assignment possible. It sounds great, but it was all set up way too fast. When I got into the helicopter at the end of the first mission, Lambert (the guy that always talks to Sam in his com) just starts narrating what happened, and says Sam “didn’t take it very well.” So I then get to see about ten seconds of Sam punching a mirror and starting a fight with someone, and then all of a sudden I’m on my next mission. It didn’t do a very good job of eliciting any kind of emotional response from me, because everything was explained to me in the span of about 30 seconds, and that’s it. However, I still think the different direction the story takes, coupled with the new way of handling stealth mechanics, just might give me an experience wholly new from that of the first Splinter Cell. I’ll keep you posted as I progress through the game, and I’ll plan on giving my final thoughts once I complete the game. So far, so good. Read more...